Entrepreneurs in Space

This morning, an unmanned Falcon 9 rocket built by SpaceX launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida. If the cargo capsule atop the rocket is successfully delivered to the International Space Station in the coming days, a new era of commercial space travel will begin, inaugurating a $1.6 billion contract for SpaceX to fly twelve cargo missions to the station. (SpaceX is also one of several companies hoping eventually to fly astronauts, tourists, and scientists into orbit around the earth.) “For us, the launch was like winning the Super Bowl,” said SpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk at a news conference following the successful liftoff.

The burgeoning of the entrepreneurial space race was the subject of Ian Parker’s 2004 article, “The X Prize.” Parker wrote about several private companies that were competing for the eponymous ten-million-dollar prize, which was created by St. Louis businessman Peter Diamandis to induce an age of space tourism. Diamandis modelled his award on the Orteig Prize, which was won by Charles Lindbergh for the first transatlantic flight, in 1927. Parker observes that many of the people involved in funding the development of private-spacecraft companies originally gained their wealth through the tech and Internet booms of the nineties. One of these was Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who backed Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne, which eventually won the X-Prize. Musk, who co-founded the startups Zip2 and PayPal, told Parker, “You had to have some kind of pre-boom to supply the capital to get the rocket boom going and that only happened with personal computers and the Internet.”

It was Musk’s other company, the electric-vehicle manufacturer Tesla Motors, that was the focus of Tad Friend’s 2009 Letter from California. In the article, Musk said that he read a lot of science fiction and fantasy as a child. “The heroes of the books I read, ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and the ‘Foundation’ series, always felt a duty to save the world,” he told Friend. SpaceX was founded with the ultimate goal of colonizing Mars. As Friend noted, Musk’s diverse ventures have a common goal:

[Musk] is also the leading investor in and chairman of SolarCity, a solar-panel-installation company run by two of his cousins. And in 2004 he provided Tesla with its initial funding, in the belief that electric vehicles, or E.V.s, together with solar power, will help wean the world off oil, buying us time to address global warming (and colonize Mars). “The likelihood of humanity gaining a true understanding of the universe is greater if we expand the scope and scale of civilization, and have more time to think about it,” he told me. “We’re like a giant parallel supercomputer, and each of our brains runs a piece of the software.”
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